Anthroposophy: Its Roots of Knowledge and Fruits of Life

GA 78 — 1 September 1921, Stuttgart

Fourth Lecture

Over the next few days, it will be my task to shape the ideas in these reflections that describe the paths to knowledge of the supersensible worlds and the practical application of the results of this supersensible research. However, I have made it my particular task this time, in order to shape these ideas, to present a kind of orientation as to how what may arise in such ideas of supersensible anthroposophical science can gain a valid relationship to those worldviews that have gained influence on humanity in recent times and which still have this influence in part. Yesterday, based on these intentions, I presented some of Friedrich Nietzsche's search, and I believe it may have become apparent that Friedrich Nietzsche's spiritual tragedy ultimately manifested itself in particular in the fact that, in order to arrive at a truly humane view of life, he had to, in a sense, break down the human being and grasp the idea of the superhuman. From Nietzsche's perspective, humanity disappeared, for which he could find no satisfying content, and he yearned for a view that he could only express lyrically or abstractly in his idea of the superhuman. On the other hand, Nietzsche felt the need to look beyond the individual human life between birth and death for a comprehensive explanation of human life and the existence of the world; but in this search he only arrived at his idea of the return of the same, of the eternal return of the same earthly life of the individual human being. In other words, he could not elicit enough from what man harbors within himself between birth and death, from what can be experienced in this span of time, to gain real content for his repeated earthly lives, and so it remained an abstract idea of the mere repetition of these earthly lives.

If one investigates more closely how Nietzsche arrived at this tragedy of the soul, why he could elicit nothing else from his profound human striving, one ultimately arrives, I believe, at the conclusions I set forth at the beginning of this century in my essay on Nietzsche's personality as a psychopathological problem in the Wiener klinische Rundschau. It seemed to me that Nietzsche did indeed strive for a comprehensive view of human existence as a whole, but that this urge lived in an organism that was unhealthy from the outset, and that this reveals how, on the one hand, his soul developed a kind of free flight precisely because of the unhealthiness of the organism, but how this flight itself could not be completely healthy. This points to the need to seek out the healthy sources of knowledge of the anthroposophical worldview.

In Nietzsche, we find that he was never able to gain a truly deeper relationship with the modern scientific view of the world. It always remained, in a sense, something crude, something that repelled his delicate constitution. He could only come to terms with ideas such as Darwin's by breaking them down, by turning his gaze away from them and not visualizing how humans physically emerged from other organisms, but rather by leaning toward the postulate that the superhuman must develop from the human. Now, even if, as it seems to me, one has penetrated so deeply into an experience of spiritual worlds, one cannot arrive at a formulation of one's views that is satisfactory for the present time unless one is able to draw the lines of spiritual perception to the scientific worldview of modern times.

At the same time that my Philosophy of Freedom was published, which initially attempted to reveal human impulses for action in an anthroposophical way as supersensible and thus sought to provide a foundation for human ethics, the then sensational reproduction of Haeckel's Altenburg speech “Monism as a Link between Religion and Science” appeared. And I do not believe that the path which contemporary man must take to the sources of knowledge of anthroposophical research can be fruitfully described without taking into account what has come into our present age with a view such as Haeckel's monism. Nietzsche's tragedy lies precisely in the fact that he was unable to adapt to such a view.

Haeckel's monism is certainly questionable in many respects, but once one has truly become accustomed to such a way of thinking, one must say that it has been influenced by the view that has emerged from modern natural science and which, in Haeckel's case, has taken on a religious, one might even say fanatical, character. But one cannot dismiss Haeckel, as so many want to do, by simply pointing to his clichés in “The History of Natural Creation.” This is something that happened to him, I would say, as a result of a certain scientific sloppiness. He drew embryos in their early stages in such a way that he simply used the same clichés for things that were, admittedly, not very different, but still different. But it is too cheap to dismiss Haeckel's entire monistic way of thinking because of such sloppiness, for it nevertheless contains, in its purest form, what imposed itself on a mind driven by consistency and modern research. This modern spirit of research has shown a tendency toward observation and experimentation. It has urged the elimination of all subjective influences on the worldview of the natural world; it has caused thinking to become extraordinarily disciplined and methodical in observation and experimentation. And even if Haeckel has made some mistakes in this regard, one will always sense this discipline and methodization of thought in his explanations as a whole, and at the same time an artistic urge to solve the highest problems that can arise from scientific research, including those concerning human beings.

What I had to say about Goethe—that he had a special state of mind that enabled him to penetrate the multifaceted and evolving plant world with his vivid ideas—also provided the basis for understanding that Goethe was an eminent mind for researching the plant world, but on the other hand it also gave rise to reservations when one sees how Goethe, with his vivid ideas, was unable to continue on this path in order to treat the realm of animal life in a way that satisfied him.

Haeckel sailed, I might say, from the whole spirit of the 1850s, during which he spent his student years, straight into the study of animal life. For him, it was necessary to study the form and development of animal beings, to study how the multiform animal beings in the world are connected with each other. It cannot be said that Haeckel was on a par with Goethe in applying his spirit of research to the animal world, for Goethe always endeavored to clarify what he was researching through a certain self-observation, thereby coming to an understanding with himself of how much external observation provides and how much must be added to it through a -supersensory perception, as he called it, must be added to the external sensory perception in order to grasp the true reality, especially of plant life. Haeckel proceeded more like a naive spirit; there was something alive in him that predestined him to penetrate the becoming of the animal world. But Haeckel did not have that sense of self-observation that can be seen in Goethe. That is why he never really gained clarity about how human beings as such stand in the world, which he had to explore in the same way that Haeckel attempted to explore the animal world.

However, because those who want to ascend from the sensory-physical world to the supersensible world in the sense of anthroposophy as understood here must, in their research, apply the same spirit that correctly introduces them to the sensory world, especially the complex sensory world of animal organisms, the research methods of natural science can help us understand many things that also belong to the ascent into imagination, inspiration, and intuition, which are necessary for supersensible research, so that we can understand it from the standpoint of today's scientific spirit. And when Haeckel's Altenburg speech came before me—I was familiar with Haeckel's previous writings—I had to say to myself: despite all the mistakes Haeckel has made, he has reached a standpoint on the sensory-physical world that must be held fast within this world if one wants to penetrate the spiritual world from a secure foundation. One must learn exactly how to conduct research, for example in zoology, in order not to fall into fantasy, but to pursue phenomena in their purity. One must have learned this if one wants to have the healthy steadfastness that entitles one to go beyond the sensory world. Before my soul stood what I must call a methodical monism that is clear that all fantastical, dilettantish chatter about life forces and the like must cease in the face of the achievements of recent research, that we must carry the same spirit that we use in sensory research into supersensible research, that we must not erect an abyss between scientific and religious content.

From the tenor of Haeckel's thinking, as expressed in his Altenburg monism speech, it became clear to me how all research should be conducted in a monistic sense. Of course, there is much to discuss about the details presented by this monism. There will certainly be many objections to be made, but from my anthroposophical point of view, I have no objection to the basic tenets of monistic thinking. Insofar as monism arises from a correct view of correct research results, I do not engage in polemics against it. I cannot help that, from an anthroposophical standpoint, I must affirm the content of monism, but that, on the other hand, even though I say yes to everything that justified monism has to say, I still have something else to add. That this something else is opposed by monists is, based on the premises I have just characterized, not my concern, but theirs.

Now, however, it is a matter of gaining something from the view of Haeckel's monism for the characterization of the supersensible research methods that I will have to describe in the following lectures. But when it comes to describing supersensible research methods, it is important to describe the soul forces that are, in a sense, hidden from ordinary consciousness and that can be developed — soul forces that are present in the soul, that exist in the depths of the soul, but that remain hidden or latent to ordinary consciousness. But then, when describing these soul forces, one is compelled to turn to the whole of human nature. From this springs not only what we have to say about things in abstract scientific terms, but also, from the depths of soul life, from the same depths from which our scientific methods spring, springs that which leads human beings to artistic creation. Anthroposophical spiritual science must repeatedly emphasize from its point of view that it addresses the whole human being, not just the intellectual, and that it thereby also comes to the realization of the relationship between scientific research and artistic creation. When one turns to this relationship, one is immediately reminded of Goethe.

Goethe did not place art and science in such stark opposition as the abstract thinkers do, but found that science can reveal a certain side of the world's mysteries, while another side of these world mysteries remains unrevealed unless one approaches the world with artistic feeling and artistic creativity. This view gave rise to what Goethe expressed in words such as: Beauty is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never be revealed without this beauty. In other words, Goethe believed that no matter how much someone characterized nature in scientifically influenced ideas, they would not have the whole of nature before them. They would still not penetrate certain underlying aspects of natural existence. These underlying aspects of natural existence, these secrets of the world, only enter our consciousness and become visible when we approach them with an artistic sensibility.

Of course, the objections to such a view are extremely plausible and therefore seductive, but they are nevertheless invalid, because one can even prove rigorously, with logical arguments based on a certain one-sided intellectual view, that so-called exact scientificity can only be achieved through logical thinking, which derives one concept from another in a continuous process of judgment. But if nature, if the world, is not at all suited to such logical analysis through its own essence, then another path must be sought to understand it. And it is precisely the spiritual researcher who finds many things on his path that bring him very close to inner artistic creation, for what he has to develop in order to cultivate supersensible powers of perception bears a great resemblance to what is active in artistic creation. Goethe felt this; hence he also uttered the words: Those to whom nature begins to reveal its obvious secrets feel the deepest longing for its most worthy interpreter, art.

It does not impair the accuracy of what one ultimately arrives at in scientific knowledge if the soul must necessarily prepare itself for the final accuracy of research through that which can work artistically within it. It does not impair, but can only promote, the fact that perhaps the soul develops within itself, precisely through artistic abilities, that which ultimately yields the best methods of knowledge. Therefore, one will have to go into some detail on the subject I am raising here if one is to describe the supersensible methods of knowledge of imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

Goethe, I said, is particularly great because of his special soul nature in the exploration of the plant world. Why is Goethe great precisely in his understanding of the plant world? To find an answer to this question, let us take a closer look at Goethe's nature. If we make an effort to visualize its special character, we see that the most characteristic feature of Goethe's nature is that he perceived everything that came before his consciousness with a kind of inner plastic creative power. In a certain sense, Goethe was on the way to becoming a sculptor, and it seems to me that the most characteristic feature of Goethe was precisely this: that the sculptural power lay in his soul, but remained in this state of mind like an innermost, hidden being, not expressing itself outwardly in sculpture, that he was, in a sense, an inner sculptor in the shaping of his spiritual views, but that he did not seek the way to incorporate into external matter that which presented itself to his soul as a spiritual view in inner sculpture. It seems to me that Goethe, in turning his gaze to the plant world, looked at it with this sculptural state of mind, with a plastic sense developed in all directions. Instead of working sculpturally in clay, instead of imprinting what his plastic sense had formed internally into the clay, Goethe turned his gaze to the plant, and instead of incorporating the plastic form into the clay, the plant revealed to his soul the plasticity that sprang from its life. This seems to me to be a part, and perhaps the most important part, of Goethe's psychology.

Now let us juxtapose this fact with another, more general one. Let us consider the plastic arts. Certainly, one can do anything in everything, but if one applies an unbiased artistic sense, how must one answer the following question: Is it possible, with complete plastic sensibility, with a fully developed plastic sense, to look at plastically formed plants in the same way as one looks at plastically formed animals or plastically formed humans? — Imagine in your mind a group of flowers, flowering plants formed in plaster or marble, before your eyes. I believe that with an unbiased plastic sense, one will have to say: Yes, the animal organization, the human organization, can naturally be brought into plastic art; plastically reproduced plants actually repel us. — Why is this? If one delves deeper into this psychological-artistic fact, then one must say: The plant, as it appears to us in nature, is so artistically plastic in itself that nature does not allow us to go beyond this natural plasticity of the plant world with any kind of sculpture. It is natural to look at the plasticity of the plant world as it is, because then one recognizes that there is something in the essence of the plant world that must already be shaped plastically as something natural. There is nothing more to add through any artistic sculpture.

Let us now take a spirit who, like Goethe, is placed in the world in a thoroughly natural way, and let us take him with his special mental disposition, with his special abilities. He is not trained to become a real sculptor, but he carries sculpture with him everywhere. See how sculpture itself plays into his most accomplished poetic creations, how “Iphigenia,” “Tasso,” and “The Natural Daughter” reveal the sculptural creative power even in the dramatic. Goethe is, in a sense, a sculptor in everything he does, but he does not manage to incorporate sculptural creativity into his writing. However, since he has a deep urge to live in complete harmony with nature, where will he find satisfaction for what lies so deep within him, his sculptural sensibility? Where nature works most purely as a sculptor: in the plant world. And now we can see from Goethe's own observations how the inner sense of the human soul must, in a sense, gravitate toward sculpture in order to grasp the plant world in its natural state, to grasp it in the way that its life itself embodies a natural sculpture.

We cannot manage with such sculpture when it comes to the inorganic. We apply measuring, counting, and weighing to a large part of the inorganic world. These are activities that actually tear apart the form; and even if we rise above this tearing apart of form in inorganic science to grasp the crystal, in inorganic science itself we are not concerned with inwardly reliving the particular plastic formation of the crystal, but rather we calculate the angles of the surfaces, we calculate the inclinations of the boundary lines, and so on. We try to understand this form from what analyzes it.

Such a view would not have satisfied Goethe's spirit in relation to the plant world. His morphology became a view of metamorphosis. He had to grasp the form of the plant directly in its plasticity in order to see through the transformation of the individual plant forms into one another. And so his view of the plant world became a moving inner plasticity. There is therefore something in plants that compels a naturally gifted spirit to transform its insights into inner, plastic forms, to make them into inner plastic forms. By doing this, by bringing to life in his soul what I would call the power of plasticity that permeates the entire plant world, Goethe arrived at the essence of the plant world. Call it what you will: in anthroposophical science, we have become accustomed to calling what Goethe perceived in plants with his plastic sense the etheric body of the plant. I will probably have to explain why in the next few days. But whatever you call it, stick to the way you have to approach the actual weaving and essence of plants with a sense of knowledge as natural as Goethe's. And then see how, in sculpture itself, you work out what you now have to shape in looking at the plant world for the animal and human form in the artistic material. It is that which animates the plant and which one finds through this sculptural sense, also in animals and humans. If one calls that which interweaves the plant in such a way that one grasps it with the sculptural sense the etheric body, then one finds this etheric body also in the animal and human organization. And the sculptor strives to shape what pervades the animal and human organisms, in which there is indeed something else, when he creates his sculptural forms of the animal and human organisms.

But when one sees the animal in nature, when one looks at the human being, then the mere plasticity of the etheric body is concealed, then something else is added to it, then through this other thing, as it were through an abstraction, one sees what lives in the plasticity as the etheric body. So one can say that Goethe's special disposition enabled him to gain deep insight into the plant world. One could say that an artistically inclined personality retains a certain artistic direction within, even when engaged in scientific activity. This enables them to discover certain secrets of the outside world that can only be discovered when this artistic ability remains within.

Ernst Haeckel turned his attention to the animal world, albeit in a more naive way than Goethe did for plants. And in a certain sense, the following can be said about Haeckel: If Goethe's thinking, as I have discussed in the previous considerations, has been rightly described by Heinroth as objective — that is, one in which the content of the soul is submerged in the objects — then this can also be seen, albeit in an imperfect way at first, in Haeckel's zoological research methods. It is deeply significant when Haeckel, in order to justify himself in his naive way, says that he does not find form—which Goethe found by limiting himself to plants—but rather finds the soul in animal beings. Haeckel talks about animals, and so he must talk about the soul.

Goethe pursued plant after plant, he pursued the metamorphosis of form. Haeckel pursued animal after animal; he did not stop at pursuing form, but went on to search for the animal soul in the forms of the animal world. And if someone had objected that he had no right to speak of this soul even in the simplest forms of the animal world, he would have repeated what he actually said: If, like me, you have spent many decades observing lower animals, such as protists, and have seen how their forms behave, then you cannot help but come to the conclusion that these cellular animals are inhabited by cellular souls that differ from the most complex souls only in terms of quality.

Goethe said on the one hand: When I go through the plant world, I see what I must see in the simplest plant organism: a form, the type of plant, the primordial plant. In the simplest plant, it offers me the same thing that is only qualitatively different from what I also find in the most perfect plant as a form, as a living type.

Haeckel says, speaking now not of the plant world but of the animal world: When I examine the entire animal world, I find the soul already in the simplest animal, and I find it metamorphosed in the most manifold ways, transformed into the most complicated forms of animal life.

There is a certain kinship between Haeckel's view of the animal world and Goethe's view of the plant world; and if one attaches importance to this, if one does not regard it as something subordinate that Goethe must speak of form and Haeckel of soul, then one is, I believe, on the way to finding something very significant. And why did Haeckel's naive researcher's soul produce what Goethe strove for in a more conscious way, in the manner I have described? I sought an explanation for this fact, and I found it to my complete satisfaction when I once looked through Haeckel's partly amateurish paintings at an exhibition at the Giordano Bruno Association in Berlin. This is something that leads into Haeckel's psychology. Haeckel is not only active as a researcher everywhere; everywhere he also sits down and paints, and everywhere he takes pleasure in capturing in color what nature reveals to his inquiring mind. The joy he took in capturing these forms of the animal world in color can still be felt when one spreads out the notebooks that Haeckel published under the title “Art Forms in Nature.”

Just as Goethe lived inwardly at a higher level in the plastic arts, so did Haeckel in the colors that conjure up the animalistic on its surface. And just as Goethe did not become a sculptor, but preserved the sculptural within himself, so Haeckel did not become a painter, but a naturalist; but painting in colors was an inner essence of his entire soul disposition. This lived within him, and he sought that which now expresses itself in the outer world in such a way that it reveals itself in color from his life, which is permeated by feeling, from the soul. He sought to explore this.

But with this we have advanced to what distinguishes the animal from the plant. Of course, one could say: The plant shows colors even more! — But everyone will feel that the innermost essence of the animal being is connected in a completely different way with what reveals itself as color than the plant. Plants actually live in form, and color is basically something that can easily be seen as being brought to the plant from outside. One will have to study the relationship of the sun and air and other external factors to the plant if one wants to consider the color of the plant. But if one wants to understand the inner nature of the plant, then one must contemplate the form of the plant with a plastic sense.

The colors that appear on the surface of the animal are not dependent on external conditions in the same way. Indeed, if it is dependent—as in the case of mimicry—we still feel compelled to explain it in terms of special conditions, because we have a feeling that the coloring also comes from within, from a life imbued with sensations. But it is not so much the color that matters, it is the life that can be relived by humans, who themselves feel and think in color. It is not the combination of colors that matters, but what one feels inwardly when one feels and thinks in colors. And just as one can speak of the etheric body in plants, which must be grasped through the plastic sense, so too must one speak of what humans and animals have beyond plants when speaking of the inner conditions of color. And if one captures what animals and humans have in common with plants, one captures it in colorless sculpture. If one resorts to painting for humans and animals, one creates in animals and humans that which allows one to look into the inner being through color, that which reveals the inner being, that which is no longer expressed merely in the metamorphosis of form, that which reveals itself in a more deeply conditioned transformability of life itself. What can be traced just as vividly in animals as in humans can be called whatever one likes: in anthroposophical spiritual science, we have become accustomed to calling it the astral body, based on the particular view that arises from inspiration. I will speak about this in the next lectures. But the fact that one is compelled to explore the transformations, the becoming of the animal, is connected with an inner state of soul that is different from the one that leads into the plant world as a plastic state of soul.

Although, as I said, in a more naive way than Goethe, Haeckel was also predisposed to penetrate the animal world artistically. And that is what makes Haeckel appear as a particularly characteristic spirit within the modern scientific worldview. The fact that he did not conduct his research in an external manner, but rather, I would say, from a restrained artistic perspective, just as Goethe approached plant metamorphosis from a restrained plastic artistic perspective, led one to feel, despite all of Haeckel's aberrations, the inner truth of Haeckel's monism and to see in it something which, if his one-sidedness can be further discarded, can also lead not only to seeking what is revealed externally in animals and humans, beyond the plant world, but also to seeking it internally, in its very essence, through extrasensory insights that are as strictly disciplined as the sensory ones are today.

There is therefore a way to enter into a modern spirit of research in a lively way, starting from the deepest needs for a humane worldview. There is a way to take up in a positive form what Nietzsche was basically never able to digest and which led him to his poignant but also shattering spiritual tragedy. The path of modern natural science must be carried over into the field of anthroposophical spiritual research if we want to arrive at genuine, valid formulations of ideas and not remain stuck in dilettantism and amateurism. Anyone who takes their time seriously must always have a certain relationship to their time. Therefore, when speaking of the sources of knowledge of anthroposophical spiritual science, it is necessary to point out this relationship to the other sources of knowledge of the present epoch. While much had to be said in the previous lectures about the rejection of agnostic thinking, today the first, perhaps still not very far-reaching, outlook has been presented in a worldview that rejects agnosticism, as was Haeckel's monism. And this indicates what this monism, even if it is in many ways outdated, can still be for us today.

When I had to write about Charles Lyell, one of the founders of modern scientific-monistic thinking, in 1897, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, Haeckel also stood vividly before my mind's eye. A community appeared in my mind that might be capable of continuing that immersion in nature, which can be found in the line of thinkers from Lyell to Haeckel, in the direction in which it must be continued. That is why I wrote for this ideal community, which was to seek the path that had been begun precisely with Haeckel's monism, those words which, if understood correctly, can indicate that with this monism, a barrier has now been crossed over which one must not return to earlier times if one wants to deal with the forces of human development rather than those of decline.

Yes, we must move forward from this monism; we must never, ever return to what has been overcome by this monism in old worldviews. That is why I wrote down the words at that time: “Even if in some places” — I ask you to note this — “we do not want to go straight past” — namely Haeckel — "he has the direction we want to take. He has received the rudder from Lyell and Darwin; they could not have given it to anyone better. And our community is sailing rapidly forward..." Yes, may it take in the rigorous scientific spirit that true natural science has brought forth, and rapidly advance into those depths of world existence that lie in the supersensible and yet can only be fathomed through supersensible research!